Compulsorily Detained Psychiatric Patients

(asked on 7th May 2024) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people serving an Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence have been transferred from prison to secure hospitals on mental health grounds in each year since 2020.


Answered by
Edward Argar Portrait
Edward Argar
Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
This question was answered on 13th May 2024

Under sections 47/49 of the Mental Health Act 1983, the Secretary of State may authorise by warrant the transfer of sentenced prisoners to a mental health hospital, where he is satisfied that the criteria for detention are met by the aforementioned Act. Thereby, and for the duration of the period in hospital, the transferred prisoner becomes what is known as a restricted patient.

The requested data in the tables below are taken from an electronic casework system. Snapshot data of restricted patients in hospital are available only at the end of each year. We have provided this information in Table 1 for 2019-2022. We are unable to recreate snapshot data, for the start of each of the last 20 quarters, due to limitations of the case management system.

Table 1: Population of offenders serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) detained in hospital as a restricted patient on 31 December in each year from 2019-2023.

Year

Population of IPP Restricted Patients

2019

272

2020

276

2021

292

2022

262

2023

241

Table 2: The number of offenders serving an IPP sentence who have been transferred from prison to secure hospitals on mental health grounds in each year since 2020.

Year

Number of transfers

2020

56

2021

41

2022

44

2023

37

Notes

  1. These figures have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large-scale recording systems are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.
  2. Where patients are admitted more than once, each admission is counted separately. This information does not count number of individual patients but instances of transfers.

Data Source: Public Protection Unit Database (PPUD)

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